G.O.P. Drafts Plan to Give Obama Discretion on Cuts

WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans are preparing to counter increasingly dire warnings from President Obama about the impact of automatic budget cuts with a plan to give the administration more flexibility in instituting $85 billion in cuts, a proposal they say could protect the most vital programs while shifting more of the political fallout to the White House.

The plan is vigorously opposed by the administration, which said Monday that it would do little to soften the blow to military and domestic programs. But it is also dividing Democrats, with lawmakers from the states facing the deepest cuts signaling that they may be prepared to go along with Republicans if it means avoiding indiscriminate cuts to military programs and social services.

With just three days left until the across-the-board cuts called sequestration are scheduled to begin, administration officials continued to describe the consequences in alarming terms, even as there was little evidence of serious negotiations with lawmakers to reach a deal to avoid them.

Still, Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and a leading defense hawk, appeared to advance the debate on Monday. “This is the chance to do the big deal,” he said on CNN. “I’m willing to raise revenue. I’m willing to raise $600 billion in new revenue if my Democratic friends would be willing to reform entitlements, and we can fix sequestration together.”

Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, said the automatic cuts would leave the country not as well guarded and less able to meet terrorist threats, and would inconvenience millions of travelers. Ken Salazar, the interior secretary, warned that campgrounds would close, firefighting efforts would be scaled back and fewer seasonal workers would be hired.

“There’s always a threat,” Ms. Napolitano said. “We are going to do everything we can to minimize that risk. But the sequester makes that very, very tough.”

Seeking to shift responsibility for the cuts to Mr. Obama and to defang attacks by the White House, Republicans were expected to unveil legislation on Tuesday that they said would mitigate some of the biggest concerns. The measure would let agencies and departments cull programs that were long ago proved to be ineffective, and would make sure critical federal functions like air traffic control and meat inspection were spared.

But White House budget officials are leery. If Congress grants the White House the authority to protect air traffic controllers, Border Patrol agents and national parks, the administration’s carefully devised high-pressure campaign that has been mounting for weeks could deflate. Moreover, the White House would take on the responsibility of deciding which programs to protect and which to expose — and the political consequences that go with that.

Daniel I. Werfel, the controller of the White House budget office, said that if the administration had to cut $2 billion from the Education Department’s budget, choosing between children covered by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act or Title I for poor districts is not freedom.

“Poor children or children with disabilities, it’s $2 billion in a seven-month period of time,” Mr. Werfel said. “The notion that there’s these enormous pockets of low-priority activities that we can move this money from — I don’t see it.”

Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, dismissed the Republican plan, saying that no amount of flexibility could mitigate the damage of the automatic cuts. He said such changes could help only “on the margins.” White House officials fear that the legislation would give lawmakers the false sense that they had voted to take the sting out of cuts that will hurt no matter what flexibility the administration has.

Photo

President Obama spoke about impending automatic budget cuts to a meeting of the National Governors Association at the White House on Monday.Credit
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

“The notion that you’re walking away from this without some of the abrupt, significant effects that would occur from the sequester — in our estimation, it’s not true,” Mr. Werfel said.

The proposal is also opposed by some Republicans who fear that it would give away too much of Congress’s authority to say where and how money gets spent. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, condemned it as an unacceptable ceding of Congressional authority.

“I say to my Republican friends, if you want to just give the president flexibility as to how to enact these cuts in defense spending, then why don’t we go home and just give him the money?” Mr. McCain said Sunday on CNN. “I am totally opposed to that.”

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Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, pointed out the irony of Republicans wanting to give Mr. Obama more discretion in how he manages the nation’s finances. “These guys bash the president nonstop,” he said in an interview. “Then they are going to take the power of the purse and say, ‘We are so unable to do our job we are going to give you complete flexibility to do it’? There’s an irony there.”

The showdown is likely to come on Wednesday, when Senate Democrats are to put to a vote legislation that would cancel this year’s automatic, across-the-board cuts and replace them with a $110 billion package of tax increases on incomes over $1 million, the elimination of farm subsidies and military cuts delayed until 2014.

Republicans had been expected to present their own package to replace the so-called sequestration. Instead, Republican leaders were expected to present the flexibility legislation.

Rather than a select set of domestic and military programs facing cuts of 11 percent to 13 percent, a much broader range of federal programs would face a considerably smaller hit. Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said that the details were not complete, and that no decision had been made to subject the largest protected parts of the budget — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and military personnel — to cuts.

But if the whole federal budget is exposed, Mr. Stewart said, the dire warnings issued daily by the White House would quickly lose credibility. “If they can’t find 2.4 percent in a $3 trillion budget, we might as well give up,” he said. “It’s not a Hobson’s choice.”

The Republican legislation, however, may be much more constrained than that, simply codifying the latitude Republicans say the administration already has to shift cuts within an agency or department without exposing more programs to the knife.

Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, has joined the effort. “I continue to work with my colleagues in urging the White House and Congressional leaders to at least provide enough flexibility for agencies to make more rational budget decisions,” Mr. Warner said in a statement.

Republicans were also taking steps to show that $85 billion is not hard to find.

Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who was drafting the flexibility bill with two fellow Republicans, Senators Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania and James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, fired off a letter to the White House budget office pointing to current job openings in the government that could go unfilled: staff assistant at the Labor Department to answer telephones, salary range $51,630 to $81,204; 10 drivers for the State Department, $22.76 to $26.45 an hour; and director for Air Force History and Museum Policies and Programs, up to $165,300 a year.

“Are any of these positions more important than an air traffic controller, a Border Patrol officer, a food inspector, a T.S.A. screener or a civilian supporting our men and women in combat in Afghanistan?” the senators’ letter asked the acting White House budget chief, Jeffrey Zients.

A version of this article appears in print on February 26, 2013, on Page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: G.O.P. Drafts Plan to Give Obama Discretion on Cuts. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe